Random musings on history, politics, and more

Archive for December 17th, 2007

Running out of room at the hosting account I’ve been using to post “stuff”, I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve been holding out on posting until I could find storage (and bandwidth) for it. That problem now solved, it’s time to celebrate with a big bunch of U.S. Army correspondence texts, all in Adobe PDF format. Today, spend some time reading about:

I missed this last week, but it seems there’s bipartisan legislation afoot to promote relatively unfettered access to Congressional Research Service reports. The limited availability of these reports has for years been a difficult-to-explain point of contention to many. While there’s no particular reason to believe this resolution will actually pass, it’s (another) step in the right direction.

Remember, CRS reports are prepared for Congress, and are the principal reference source for Senators and Representatives. They are, in a very real sense, the “intelligence” Congresscritters use when deliberating legislation. Not only would making this readily available permit an interesting environment for open-source analysis and fact-checking, but it would provide an excellent reference body for the public at large – like Wikipedia, only more narrowly focussed, and a little bit more reliable (which, I know, isn’t saying much…)